While in Moscow, I have had the opportunity to meet some very smart people who understand the marketplace here as well as the culture. Some work at Ogilvy. There are some others who are connected to SUP, the new media company that now owns LiveJournal. I will post my video interviews soon with Edward Shenderovich, a sharp internet businessman and Andrew Paulson, the serial entrepeneur who started SUP, and has guided the growth of the company including it's outright purchase of Live Journal from SixApart in 2007.
Here are some quick factoids and POVs on social media in Russia
Live Journal, the blog platform has about 30m unique users which is roughly half of the connected population (60M) and represents about 20-25% of the entire population (140m)
Andrew is a firm believer in the content focus of LiveJournal and its user and business value. (I love believers)
Andrew also built a small digital agency inside SUP to not just create client solutions that include LiveJournal and Championt.ru, a sports media property but to be agreat digital agency in a market that needd it
Social Networks are starting to catch on with some Facebook clones hitting the market
Both Edward and Andrew see the rise of blogger/journalists on the horizon but also see the dilution of the value of online cpms with th egrowth of low-value social network pages
Many of the other internet companies have a mix of Web 1.0 properties like Rambler's Mama.ru and are dependent on the value of advertising (and the vagaries of that market) to drive revenue
Yandex is the favored search engine in the market. There is a slice of the service that specifically searches blogs. In 2004, Yandex sales increased to $17M, which was 10 times greater than the company's revenue just 2 years earlier. In June of 2006, the weekly revenue of Yandex.Direct context ads system exceeded $1M
Oh, and Red Square closes at night so I had to peer through the bars to be able to "experience" it
What does the future look like? Look for the videos in teh next few days and you can hear from teh experts in-market.
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